


The Alien

by Ducks



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Character Study, CoC, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-05
Updated: 2009-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-02 11:21:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ducks/pseuds/Ducks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wonders, has an alien taken over his body? His soul, his life?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Alien

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes in (()) are dialogue from the show (Sleep Tight, That Old Gang of Mine, and and War Zone, specifically), not mine. Thanks to ladymackenzie for the beta and comments. Inspired by the poem "Aliens" by Kim Addonizio. Originally posted July 25, 2007.

_"More food, it whines. Fuck me again,  
it whispers, and afterwards we'll go to the circus.  
The phone rings. Don't answer it."_

~ Kim Addonizio, "Aliens"

~

Fred screams in her sleep, some nights. Whimpers or cries on others. Until he touches her, takes her in his arms, her thin body so frail and strong. Until she wakes, she’s lost, and when she lays that look on him with those big, dark eyes, he thinks, "Man, I love this lady."

They make love with the light on, so she doesn’t have to be afraid of the dark.

Her skin is fair and blue-veined, so transparent he thinks he can watch her blood flow, heart to brain, heart to feet and back again when the sun hits her just right. So white, like porcelain. Like ivory. Like dove feathers. Like…purity and rightness and all things good.

He realizes it the day she says, "Honestly, I never even thought of you as black until you said something."

He knows she means it. Even raised where she was, in the dead center of the Bush Belt, she just doesn’t understand how it works. ((Texas loves the black man)) Or maybe five years as a cow in a hostile dimension where every human was seen as slave or food has changed the way she views the word "race." He doesn’t remember any dark skinned humans in Pylea. Wonders what that means. About them. About him.

How funny that it reflects the reality here as well. Their world is so white. And green and purple and orange and every color except brown. He’s started to think of "race" differently himself. Wes and Angel, so white. Even Lorne, who’s greener than astroturf, reads as white in his brain.

But he doesn’t think of Fred as white anymore. Not really. She’s just… Fred. Like he’s become just… Gunn. And that realization makes him more uneasy than the fact that he’s compromised his principles in order to work with the enemy, a thing he doesn’t trust, a monster he would have killed not so long ago. Tried to, in fact. Works with him because that monster is a moral monster, has a mission that Gunn admires and can get behind.

His own gang, his own, let him down a long time ago, and he had to walk away. ((Lost the mission, bro)) Chose this new family over the one he’d built, in death and sweat, blood and loss. They leaned on each other for so long, but he had to choose. He feels like Wes is more his brother than Rondell ever was.

What does that mean? What does that say about who Charles Gunn’s become?

He lies in the dark and looks at the shadows growing and shifting on the ceiling, and thinks about blackness. Black and poor and lost, and his little sister saying something rude to a brother with a white girlfriend. He had cuffed her upside the ear and said "That shit don’t matter down here."

Alonna had nailed him with a look. "It always matters, Charles."

((I was supposed to take care of you))

Fred mumbles something about pizza and french fries. She’s always hungry. He likes that about her. A light from a passing truck cuts the darkest shadow overhead, and he thinks about Fred’s smile. How she smells like orange soda sometimes, what she calls her Orangina Shampoo. He doesn’t know what the hell Orangina is, but she giggles when she says it like he should, so he pretends that he does.

She cuts the rougher parts of him. His darkness. His anger. The rage and the yearning for an end to it all that once drove him. Like the years and the work and these people have cut him. Sometimes he thinks maybe they’ve cut him away entirely. What’s left? What if the darkness was him, and this tame, content, happy Gunn is a pod thing, a wan, bleached alien taking over his brown body, his black brain, the life of color that once seemed like everything and nothing all at once? Something hungry, like Fred, that ate him from the inside out? Made him soft and fat and colorblind?

Nobody has a color at night, and everybody bleeds the same to vampires. The irony of that eats at him sometimes. So many degrees of grey.

But humans don’t care as much about the insides… especially of the ones downtown, shades of brown and poor white that just vanish, poof. A shadow, a meal, another dead nothing. Who is he now that he doesn’t save them anymore? By making them invisible, has he done the same to himself? Does he honor his long lost sister with this new mission, or does he spit on her grave, on the graves of their parents, dead longer still than that? When he holds this colorless woman in his arms, what does that say about who. He. Is?

"NO! NO! NOOOOO!"

Fred’s scream ruptures the dark, as if she can hear his thoughts. He automatically reaches for her. Wraps her up, brings her to him, holds her while she cries. Pushes it all away, for now. Whispers, "It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. I’m here."

She clings to him. So small. Desperation and transparent tears down cheeks the color of snow over peaches in his memory, but silver and grey in the dim street lights. She needs him so much. Fear and love and dread have no color either. The rest can matter tomorrow.

"Please. Charles, please. It’s too dark. Please turn on the light."


End file.
